Crossdocking

Literature and interesting Web sites

Lecture material
Bartholdi & Hackman, Chpt. 11
Kevin Gue, Crossdocking: Just-In-Time for Distribution, Tech. Report,
Graduate School of Business & Public Policy, Naval Postgraduate School,
Monterey, CA, May 2001
J. Bartholdi and K. Gue, The Best Shape for a Crossdock, working paper
K. Gue, The Effects of Trailer Scheduling on the Layout of Freight
Terminals, Transportation Science, 33:4, pg. 419-428, November, 1999.

An interesting site:
http://web.nps.navy.mil/~krgue/Crossdocking/crossdocking.html

The driving idea behind crossdocking

Crossdocking seeks to eliminate the expensive functions of
inventory holding and order picking from modern
distribution centers by taking advantage of the information
system infrastructure in modern supply chains.
Hence, at a crossdock, incoming material is already
assigned to a destination, and therefore, the only required
functions are consolidation and shipping.
In this way, material is staged at the facility for less than
24 hours.
=> Just-In-Time for distribution

Major requirements for

justifying and effectively deploying
a crossdock operation
Significant and steady product flow
easy to handle material / unit-loads
Good and reliable information flow across the entire
supply chain
pre-distribution crossdocking: the customer is assigned
before the shipment leaves the vendor, so it arrives to
the crossdock bagged and tagged for transfer.
post-distribution crossdocking: the crossdock itself
allocates material to its stores.

Examples
Home Depot operates a pre-distribution crossdock in Philadelphia
serving more than 100 stores in the Northeast area.
Wal-Mart uses
traditional warehousing for staple stock - i.e., items that customers are expected to
find in the same place in every Wal-Mart (e.g., toothpaste, shampoo, etc.)
crossdocking for direct ship - i.e., items that Wal-Mart buyers have gotten a great
deal on and are pushing out to the stores

Costco uses pallet-based post-distribution crossdocking

Computer firms like Dell consolidate the major computer components in
merge in transit centers.
JIT manufacturers consolidate inbound supplies in a nearby warehouse
LTL and package carriers (UPS, FedEx) crossdock to consolidate freight

Crossdock Operations

Strip doors: doors where full trailers are parked and unloaded.
Any incoming trailer can be unloaded to any strip door.
Stack doors: doors where empty trailers are put to collect freight for
specific destinations. Each stack door is permanently assigned to a distinct
destination.
Typical material handling modes:
manual carts for smaller items
pallet jacks and forklifts for pallet loads
cart draglines (reduce walking time but impede forklift travel)

A queueing model for

the crossdock operations

Customers: Inbound trailers

Servers: Strip doors
Buffering Queue: Parking lot
Processing times
customer-dependent: freight mix
server-dependent: distance of the strip door under consideration
from the stack doors serving the destinations of the trailer freight

Optimizing the crossdock performance

The major operational cost for crossdock is the labor cost.
Hence, the system performance is optimized by seeking to maximize the
throughput of the crossdock operations by establishing an efficient freight
flow.
Factors affecting the freight flow:
Long term decisions:
Number of doors and shape of the building
Employed material handling systems
parking facilities

Medium term decisions:

Crossdock layout, i.e., the characterization of the various doors as strip or stack doors, and
the assignment of specific destinations to the stack doors

Short term decisions

Inbound Trailer Scheduling

The number of doors and

the parking lot size
Number of stack doors: determined by the volume of freight
moved to each customer, and any potential delivery schedules
Number of strip doors: since trailer unloading is a faster job
than trailer loading, a common rule of thumb is to have twice
as many stack doors as strip doors, so that you balance the
incoming with the outgoing flow.
In general the larger the number of doors in the crossdock, the
larger the distances that must be traveled.
The parking lot should provide parking space for two trailers
per door, so any flow surges can be accommodated without
considerable problems.

The shape of the crossdock building

Corners are bad! Specifically:

Internal corners take away door locations (about 8 doors per corner)
External corners take away storage space in front of the door (w/2 doors worth of
floor space)

On the other hand, a building shape that minimizes its corners increases
the travel distances
the traffic congestion in front of the most centrally located (and therefore,
the best) doors

Some characterizations of the crossdock building shapes:

diameter: max door-to-door distance
centrality: the ratio of the obtained number of extra doors over the resulting
diameter increase for a symmetric expansion of the building by two doors at each
end of it.

Suggested building shapes:

I for small crossdocks (up to 150 doors)
T for medium size crossdocks (between 150-250 doors)
X for the largest crossdocks (above 250 doors)
Frequently, the building shape is determined by
available land, an existing building, etc.

other constraints, e.g.,

Crossdock layout
In general, centrally located doors should be reserved for the uloading activity and
for destination with large outgoing flows.
On the other hand, if the freight on each inbound trailer is destined to a small and
stable set of customers, then the facility can be decongested by establishing
distinct hubs serving clusters of destinations that tend to have their freight on the
same incoming trailers.
Two extensively used heuristics are:
the block heuristic: Assign first the unloading activity to the best doors (i.e. the doors having
the smallest average distances to all other doors). Subsequently, assign the remaining doors to
outbound destinations, prioritizing them in decreasing order of their flow intensities
the alternating heuristic: The door assignment alternates between a strip door and a stack door
to the destination with the next highest flow
=> The alternating heuristic produces solutions that are typically 10% better than the solutions
produced by the block heuristic.

Trailer Scheduling
How should we pick the next inbound trailer to be processed
at a free strip door?
If the freight mix tends to be uniform across all inbound
trailers, then a simple rule like FIFO will perform well.
Otherwise, the selected trailer should be the one that will
have the smallest processing time w.r.t. the considered strip
door, among those currently waiting in the parking lot.